56 HENRY is pleased to present a new version of Nikita Gale’s INTERCEPTOR for The Armory Show. INTERCEPTOR was first conceived of in 2019. In this new iteration, the work will be expanded to fill the entirety of the booth. INTERCEPTOR formally references 19th-century barricade design. The work examines the infrastructure of crowd control. Though now a commonplace sight at concerts and protests, these tools have radical, populist origins. Once cobbled together by insurgents in the French Revolution in order to defend themselves, barricades have served as protection from authoritarian violence, stages upon which protestors would address each other, and social spaces behind which protestors mingled. Through mass production and distribution, these formerly revolutionary tools have become a hand of the state. INTERCEPTOR investigates this act of appropriation, and the ways in which freedom to speak and listen are negated by the presence and disruption of the barricades.

In Gale’s practice, which often surrounds the politics of performance and particularly incorporates sound, INTERCEPTOR is no outlier. Through the inhibition of sound and space, Gale is able to conjure a conscious silence which becomes a radical tool of refusal. At the Armory Show, Gale will fill an entire booth with these barricades. In their own words, the huge and looming figure of the work will “implicate contemporary materials in historical processes of alienation, appropriation, control, and violence.”

VIP PREVIEW: Thursday, September 4 | 11:00 am – 7:00 pm (by invitation only)

Friday, September 5 | 11:00 am – 7:00 pm
Saturday, September 6 | 11:00 am – 7:00 pm
Sunday, September 7 | 11:00 am – 6:00 pm

Booth D05

The Javits Center
Crystal Palace Entrance
429 11th Avenue, New York, NY, 10001